But he recognizes there’s an untapped audience that assumes classical music is not for them. “Prejudice is the biggest problem in terms of classical music. There is this idea that it’s something for old people. You have to behave in a certain way, you have to wear certain types of clothes, you have to be kind of hopelessly boring. And none of this is true.”

To open up classical music for a new generation of listeners, Salonen set out to demystify the workings of an orchestra. “I wanted to shed light on the symphony orchestra — its history and its present. To explain how and why it works the way it works,” he says. That led Salonen and his colleagues in the Philharmonia to develop The Orchestra app for iPad.

The Orchestra harnesses the power of iPad Air to provide users with an interactive, immersive look at all the elements of an orchestra. “All of a sudden, what looks kind of odd and distant and maybe a little abstract becomes much more real and normal,” Salonen says. “I’d be delighted if somebody would discover classical music through The Orchestra.”

Salonen is constantly capturing inspiration from the world around him on his iPad Air. “I hope I never lose this feeling that when I wake up in the morning, I’m curious,” he says. “I want to know more about everything, things that exist, things that I know already.”

For Salonen, ideas tend to come at unexpected moments. “I have no mantras. I have no strict routines,” he says. Salonen always has his iPad Air on hand to capture what he calls these first impulses of inspiration. He uses the Notion app to write bits and pieces of music — chords, melodies, rhythms. Or sometimes he uses Notes to describe moods and feelings in words that he later translates into music.

Salonen gathers ideas over the course of six to nine months. Then, when his conducting season ends, he sits down and begins to determine which of those pieces will help shape a full-length orchestral composition.

A symphony can feature as many as 23 different types of instruments, played by 40 to 100 performers. A major challenge for the composer is to achieve the perfect balance of instrumentation across the composition. Salonen’s iPad Air allows him to play back a full score wherever he goes, and adjust and refine the expressive character of each instrument.

“Classical music composing is really slow,” says Salonen. “And it’s intensely lonely.” Salonen may spend hours developing a small section of a piece that lasts only a few seconds when performed. He uses the Pianist Pro app to play pieces of music into composition software on his Mac. Then, thanks to the processing power of iPad Air, he can open the same complex score in Notion to make changes and play them back. The playback function allows Salonen to hear the piece as it evolves, something that wasn’t possible before without assembling an orchestra to perform it.

“I have this total freedom to go back and forth between my full studio and the most portable setup I can imagine,” Salonen says. That compactness and power is especially important as he travels the world, shuttling between performances and rehearsals.

Once the score is finished, it goes to the orchestra to be played for the first time. “That’s the scariest bit, actually, the first rehearsal,” he says. “That is the first time you hear your piece come to life. Classical music is all about the live experience. The beauty of the uniqueness of the moment. Knowing that when you go to a concert you hear something that will never be played exactly the same way again.”